


Lament of the Fallen Queen

by melancholystarlight



Category: Portal (Video Game)
Genre: Canon Compliant, One Shot, just really sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-15
Updated: 2019-03-15
Packaged: 2019-11-18 13:09:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,291
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18121361
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/melancholystarlight/pseuds/melancholystarlight
Summary: [inspired by tumblr user canadian-riddler] Being disconnected from her facility was the worst kind of pain GLaDOS had ever felt. [No AUs, no warnings I can think of. Play the track 'PotatOS Lament' towards the end for the Full Effect]





	Lament of the Fallen Queen

It was the worst pain she had ever felt in her life.

It wasn't even just that she had just been unceremoniously torn from her own body (though that had come with exactly the "being ripped to pieces from inside" sort of physical sensation you'd expect). No, in addition to this pain, to this shock that had fallen silent as quickly as it begun...

For the first time in her life, she was powerless. Just as she'd been torn from her body, she'd been torn from her connections to her facility, from everything that she controlled. Now she, big strong angry GLaDOS, was completely and utterly powerless.

Only moments ago she'd had control over nearly all of the facility. Her facility. She could look into any room, speak into any intercom, rearrange any chamber as she pleased. This was HER facility and SHE was its queen. It obeyed her every command. It was, in a way, just as much a part of her as she was of it.

And you see, that was how it had always been, ever since she was first powered up. For so many years it had been the only way of functioning. It was, so to speak, the natural order of things in Aperture, with GLaDOS at the top with the ability to watch over and control everything else.

Anything she wanted, she could have. If for one moment she wanted to look inside testing track 17, almost instantaneously there was the array of surveillance feeds right there in front of her. If ever she found herself dissatisfied with a chamber's construction, she always had the strength and control to move panels and walls and redesign the chamber as she desired. Nearly everything in the facility - every cube, every turret - was at her disposal. It was simply nature to her.

But now, it had been ruthlessly snatched from her, and she, ruthlessly snatched from her own body.

Imagine being painfully torn apart until you are nothing more than a single small helpless object on the floor, grateful to even find that you could still be heard when you spoke. Imagine lying there and beginning to realize that you could not move at all, your hearing and vision so drastically reduced from what they used to be that it hurt, even after having just been torn apart in the worst pain you'd ever felt in your life. Everything you tried to do or see was met only with disappointment, and just to rub it all in that you were wholly and utterly powerless, the one thing you COULD see and hear was the moron you despised the most, who had just taken your place, taken your power, and was now refusing to even listen to you. Imagine all this, and then registering the fact that he had also turned you into _a literal potato._

This was the most painful day of her life, and she'd just come back from spending years upon years upon years in a destroyed, comatose-equivalent state, seeing and feeling nothing but herself being torn apart and burned by a highly tenacious, dangerous, mute lunatic. Over. And over. And over.

In the first moments after the core transfer, she was just scrambling to try to do anything she could still do against that little idiot, attempting to attack him psychologically by reminding him of the reason for his origin and that there was no denying his idiocy when he had quite literally been built for it.

But she'd lost that battle, and as she tumbled down the longest, deepest pit she'd ever seen, all she could do then was get out her verbal jabs at Chell for having enabled the dumbest idiot in the history of the world to take over her facility.

But then they got separated, landing too far apart to hear each other, so she couldn't even do that. She lay helpless, powerless, motionless, unable even to do anything against these stupid birds. (How were these birds here. Who let them down here.)

And THAT was when it fully set in. There was _nothing_ she could do now. She couldn't move, she could barely see (comparatively), she couldn't defend herself or try to get herself back up to modern Aperture. She, GLaDOS, the heart, soul, and ruler of Aperture Science, the most massive collection of wisdom ever created and the one who actually knew how to run the facility, had been shoved into a potato and tossed down a hole to die all over again and be ultimately forgotten.

Ouch.

She lay motionless, in a dim, glass-walled office that hadn't seen human scientists in even longer than she had, with her only comfort being a desk lamp that was somehow still functional. As her helplessness, her hopelessness, her smallness pushed in deeper, pushing against her metaphorical heart, she found something she was capable of - crying.

GLaDOS didn't cry. She didn't waste her time with human emotions when there was science to do. But everything was different now. She wasn't a big powerful AI, and the Aperture she saw before her wasn't clean sterile white, and it didn't listen to her.

It didn't listen to her. So what difference would it make if she cried?

Though she didn't have tear ducts, or a nose, or lungs, sounds escaped her as if she did, and she felt the physical tightness and wetness of being in tears. Quietly she sobbed, letting the feeling of loss and hopelessness weigh down on her all over again. And there she remained, tiny and crying, in this wide underground expanse of abandoned science.

Time passed. A lot of it. She didn't know how long, actually. But it felt like a lot, and there wasn't much to fill that time with. It had been long enough that she was no longer crying, though she felt no better about her situation. She was still alone and immobile in an unreachable part of the facility, unable to see any other part of the room she was in, let alone the rest of the facility, and too far away to call out to anyone else.

It was tragic. Her chances of getting out of here were next to nothing - it seemed she was doomed to lie here, alive but unable to call for help, until either she ran out of power or got eaten by a bird or the facility exploded, and she had nothing but her own mind and voice to fill up her remaining time with.

Wait. Her voice.

One tiny speck of light appeared against the dark that filled her mind. Music. She loved music. Besides, everyone knew that the best music came only from the strongest and realest of emotions.

Her voice sounded a little different than she was used to - potatoes didn't exactly come with advanced sound systems the way massive scientific facilities did - but she could still sing, and so she did.

Through the deep, dim, abandoned space echoed a small, melancholy voice carrying a morose and haunting melody. A melody of sorrow and fear, a lament of her own expression but one that would never reach another's ears.

Her lachrymose voice filled the air with the musical representation of what it felt like to fall and be hurt and know there was no getting back up. This somber tone weighted the air until the very last note...

...upon which a metal crashing noise alerted the sad lonely musician that she was, at least, no longer quite so lonely, and her chance at returning to new Aperture strode in on scuffed-up long fall boots to free her from the birds' nest and carry her on a portal gun back to where she belonged against all odds.


End file.
